The Champions League final, eh?
The biggest game in club football, for many. The sort of occasion any young footballer will have dreamt about, surely?
Not Gini Wijnaldum.
The Liverpool midfielder is preparing for his second shot at the big prize. Disappointed in Kiev a year ago, the Dutchman hopes to right the wrongs in Madrid this weekend. Beat Tottenham, and the 28-year-old will achieve a lifelong ambition.
Or will he?
“No,” Wijnaldum says. “I had a dream to play at as high a level as possible when I was young, but Champions League finals? I never really had that dream.
“Now you have even children watching the Champions League final every year, they live and breathe it, but I probably never even looked at them when I was a kid.
“The only thing I wanted was to be a professional footballer and to play in the World Cup. But even that wasn’t something I really wanted; it was just something I thought would be nice!”
Wijnaldum struggles when asked to name his earliest Champions League final memory. Even a mention of Istanbul, and Liverpool’s epic victory over Milan in 2005, fails to elicit a huge response.
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“I watched the highlights, yeah?” he smiles. “My family watched it. It could have been PSV Eindhoven in that final. They were one goal away, yeah?
“See, I know a few things, but not everything!
“I was interested more in gymnastics. I didn’t even go to the games. When I was at Sparta Rotterdam, they gave us season tickets, but I always gave them away to my friends so they could go with their families.
“Even now, I don’t watch a lot of football.”
If that sounds surprising, it should. Plenty at Liverpool believe Wijnaldum, of all the current first-team squad, is the most likely to move into management once his playing career is up. He has the tactical nous, he has the temperament and the personality.
“Me?!” laughs the man himself, shaking his head. “No!
“I don’t think I want to be a manager, but a lot of players say that!
“Maybe it’d be difficult to say goodbye to football, but being a manager is such a hard job. You work with egos, you have to keep 24 players happy to pick a team. You have to deal with disappointed players, keep them happy.
“It’s a hard job, dealing with the media as well. It can be hard. I’m not sure!”
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At least he has a few years to decide.
At 28, Wijnaldum is enjoying perhaps the best season of his career. He is Liverpool’s midfield chameleon, able to play just about any role asked of him.
Even if, as in the first leg of the semi-final against Barcelona, that means playing as an auxiliary centre-forward. He scores fewer goals than he did in his younger years at Feyenoord, PSV and Newcastle, but he contributes more.
Pep Lijnders, the Reds’ assistant manager, believes Wijnaldum and Roberto Firmino represent this Liverpool more than any other. “Because they can do anything and everything,” he has said.
Wijnaldum’s ability to shape-shift – he has played as holding midfielder, a wide player, a No.10, a box-to-box shuttler and even, at times, as a third centre-back from time to time – makes him a Klopp favourite, but does he ever feel his versatility can be a curse?
“Yeah, sometimes it is difficult,” he says. “There are good sides and bad sides. The good side is if you can play everywhere, it’s easier for a manager to put you in the team. He knows you can help the side out.
“Look at [James] Milner, he can play everywhere. If we need a left-back, he plays there, right-back, midfield. I think he could probably stand in goal even!
“But at the other side if you have two good midfielders and only one position, a lot of times the manager will put the midfielder who can only play in midfield, and use the other one in another position. Like I say, there is good and bad.”
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Wijnaldum’s status at Liverpool continues to grow. He is a firm favourite among supporters, and was this week described by Trent Alexander-Arnold as “the joker” of the Reds dressing room.
Earlier this season, his team-mates selected him and Virgil van Dijk to join the ‘captaincy group’ alongside Jordan Henderson and the evergreen Milner.
“I voted for Virgil, [Dejan] Lovren and [Simon] Mignolet,” Wijnaldum says. “But what makes a good captain? For one person, it is this, for another, it is this.
“I’m not really the person to be like ‘Come on, guys!’ in the dressing room, but when I feel I have to say something, then I say it.
“For me, nothing has changed. We were put in that position because of how we act now, so I don’t think there is a reason to change.”
As for Saturday, he hopes it will be third time lucky. The two biggest games of his career so far were a World Cup semi-final and a Champions League final, and he lost both.
“Hopefully, this year it will come to the right end!” he smiles.
And who knows, maybe, if it does, he’ll find time to watch it back?